When the answers just aren’t concrete

Eighty years ago in the Hollywood Hills, Frank Lloyd Wright embarked on a grand experiment in modular housing that he called the Textile Block System. The notion was to simplify construction to the point where clients with no special skills could help build their own homes by mixing cement, slamming sledgehammers into aluminum molds to stamp the tablets with Wright’s elaborate Mayan-inspired patterns, then forming them into blocks. These blocks would simply be stacked, one atop another, woven together with a warp and woof of steel rods.

By unifying decoration and function, exterior and interior, earth and sky -- perforated blocks served as skylights -- Wright saw his Textile Block approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal.

It all came together -- and slowly began falling apart -- in a bilevel hillside cottage overlooking Highland Avenue that would come to be known as the Freeman House.

The method caused structural problems almost from the beginning, when businessman Sam Freeman and his bohemian wife, Harriet, complained about leaky roofs and rusting rebar. Earthquake damage and moisture-corroded concrete further deteriorated the building, now owned by the University of Southern California.

Two years ago as part of a $1.3-million restoration, USC teachers and students began collaborating with Los Angeles Trade Tech College machinists on a rescue effort aimed at replacing the home’s crumbling edifice with freshly minted blocks based on virtual 3-D models.

On a recent afternoon, Robert Timme, dean of the USC School of Architecture, toils in the broiling sun on the campus with a half-dozen architecture students-cum-builders. Amid the rumble of diesel-powered stamping machinery and rock music blaring from a radio, Timme pokes a still-moist slab with a makeshift vacuum nozzle duct-taped onto a copper pipe, sucking out loose gravel, as a couple of students mix a fresh batch of concrete precisely proportioned to Wright’s original specifications.

“How many people can say they’ve physically reconstructed part of a Frank Lloyd Wright house?” Timme notes, taking a break from his labors. “We realized we could have a class where the students make these blocks, apply them at the site to build a column. When it’s over with, every student knows what block they’ve made, and that column then becomes a part of them.”

Rogie Augustin, 27, a husky third-year architecture student, is doing his part by operating a stamping machine that applies 2 tons of pressure to an aluminum mold. That, in turn, imprints a wood-framed, 16-inch-square tablet of freshly poured concrete with Wright’s elaborate Mayan-inspired design. Augustin then gingerly lifts the 40-pound slab and jiggles it onto a tray where it joins a new crop of tiles, drying like loaves of bread in a bakery.

“It’s kind of like going back in time to see how every little detail was considered in the design,” Augustin says of the block work. “Just getting into the nitty-gritty, you can really see how it all came together. I kind of feel like I’m taking part in history.”

Indigenous invention

The historical import of the Freeman House can’t be underestimated. Along with the 1923 La Miniatura in Pasadena, the 1921 Hollyhock House on Hollywood Boulevard, the massive 1924 Ennis-Brown House in Los Feliz and the 1924 Storer House also on Hollywood Boulevard (which was restored by its former owner, movie producer Joel Silver), the Freeman House represents an early expression of Wright’s enduring fascination with concrete. “Buildings could grow right up out of the ground,” Wright wrote in an in-praise-of-concrete essay for Architectural Record shortly after completing his L.A. Textile Block homes. “Cement may be the secret stamina of the physical body of our new world.”

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of archives for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation based at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz., says, “As designs, the Textile Block homes were a break from everything Wright had done before. He felt it was an architectural form more fitting to the Southwest, so he decided to take the concrete block, which previously had been a despised material, and render it as something beautiful.”

After completing the Textile Block homes, Wright applied his patterned block approach to the 1927 Arizona Biltmore hotel in Phoenix. In the ‘30s, he produced several more concrete-centric private residences before finally perfecting his everyman-a-builder concept in the late ‘40s with a series of seven homes he dubbed “Usonian Automatic.”

“His dream,” Pfeiffer says, “was that you could go into a lumberyard or a building supply place, buy his molds and a set of plans, and then build your own house. He really planned the Usonian Automatic homes to be a do-it-yourself, Home Depot sort of operation.”

When Wright died in 1959, he had, on his drawing board, plans for yet another private home built with blocks.

Build your own landmark

Eight miles northwest of the USC campus, Frank Dimster, supervising architect of the Freeman House restoration, conducts a tour of the work-in-progress Glencoe Way site: “Wright had a genuine interest in this idea that the foundation was to be built by the professionals, but the making and the laying of the blocks -- everyone could do that on weekends as sort of a neighborhood project. That was visionary, but it also had problems. The most obvious one was, as you can see, he left out the mortar.”

Matters weren’t helped during the original construction when the cement mixer was repossessed for nonpayment of bills. “The composition varied wildly because when they made these blocks they just used a shovel and dug up two of these and three of those and threw in some water, and maybe got some dirt into the mix that shouldn’t be there,” Timme says.

Harriet Freeman, who lived in the house until her death in 1986, bequeathed the property to USC. It laid in disrepair for 13 years. “The school never had the money to do the restoration,” Timme says. That changed after Timme became dean in 1996 and raised about $1.3 million. The Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed $750,000 to repair earthquake damage and retrofit the building. A $60,000 Preserve L.A. grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust underwrote the block-replacement program. The rest of the money came from USC.

“We’ve got discretionary funds given to the school, so over a three- or four-year period I earmarked a lot of funding toward this project,” Timme explains. “Previous deans told me they did not want to put resources into the house because they’d rather put it into the teaching programs. I saw it differently. To me it was very justifiable ... because we’d be developing what would become a teaching instrument for the school. Now we could use the Freeman House as a laboratory.”

By 2002, with the home’s three-year earthquake-related renovation completed, Timme and company focused on removing, and replicating, about 1,200 pattern blocks. One problem: The original decorative tiles had been produced by two aluminum molds. Only the “right-hand” engraving could be found. Enter USC architecture professor Doug Noble.

“My responsibility was to take one mold and make another one that is its mirror image,” says Noble, who decided the case of the missing mold could be solved by creating a digital doppelganger. “I proposed that we could work with some higher-tech technologies to accomplish that.”

Noble brought in L.A. Trade Tech professor Chuong Vo, who put his students to work laser-scanning the existing mold with stereoscopic cameras to create a virtual 3-D model. This was then “flipped” by software to generate the identical mold, but in reverse.

Wright’s extraordinarily intricate block pattern was hard to tame. Working their way through a succession of glitches, Trade Tech students eventually measured each of the piece’s 300 recessed surfaces and translated the raw geometry into software code. The “CAD-CAM” data then programmed robotic milling machines with the instructions needed to reproduce an almost perfect polyurethane prototype. This was then used to cast the final aluminum mold.

Only then did Vo and his team realize they’d made a mistake of microscopic proportions. The plastic template shrank slightly as it dried. “This prototype we were using was a little smaller than it should be,” Vo says. How much smaller? A thousandth of an inch here, a thousandth of an inch there, he says, pointing out that a strand of human hair measures about three-thousandths of an inch wide.

Noble is pleased enough with the digitally reincarnated aluminum mold but admits: “In truth, we’re not really done. We’re using this as a prototype, but it has flaws since we did not match, exactly, the original. We’ve gone back to refine the model. We’re going to cut it again, the foam one first, and then another aluminum one, to get the real one.”

The shiny new cast, engraved with the names of the contributing Trade Tech students, isn’t likely to keep anyone but Vo and Noble awake at night.

Consider it obsession in the service of a famously finicky master architect who didn’t quite get it right the first time. “The new blocks are actually better,” Timme says, “but what is original is the design. When it’s finished you won’t see the concrete; you’ll see what Frank Wright intended in terms of external surfaces. And hopefully that structure will last.”